Director Zak Hilditch talks to us about We Bury The Dead – an unmissable, emotional zombie thriller starring Daisy Ridley. We Bury The Dead does for the zombie movie what Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival did for the alien invasion yarn, or what Gareth Edwards’ debut, Monsters, did for the kaiju flick. It’s a genre thriller with ... We Bury The Dead | Inside the Daisy Ridley zombie thriller you shouldn’t miss
Director Zak Hilditch talks to us about We Bury The Dead – an unmissable, emotional zombie thriller starring Daisy Ridley.
We Bury The Dead does for the zombie movie what Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival did for the alien invasion yarn, or what Gareth Edwards’ debut, Monsters, did for the kaiju flick. It’s a genre thriller with flashes of stark horror, but above, all We Bury The Dead is an emotional drama: the story of a solitary woman looking for answers in the wake of disaster.
Daisy Ridley plays Ava, an American who’s flown to the Australian continent in search of her husband, Mitch (Matt Whelan). Days earlier, a US military experiment went wrong, sending out a gigantic electromagnetic pulse wave across Tasmania, killing all 500,000 of the island’s inhabitants in an instant. Mitch was there on a business trip at the time, and Ava, knowing her husband’s likely fate, joins a platoon of civilian volunteers sweeping Tasmania for dead bodies.
It’s a grim task, with volunteers like Ava asked to pick through abandoned houses for bodies; to make matters worse, the Australian military doesn’t even bother to hand out much in the way of protective gear. Meanwhile, Ava has a plan: peel away from the search and find out exactly what happened to her husband. But before she goes, there’s a word of warning: dead bodies have sometimes been known to get up and start moving around…
We Bury The Dead is the latest film from Australian director Zak Hilditch, whose previous work includes the end-of-the-world thriller These Final Hours (2013) and the 2017 Stephen King adaptation, 1922, starring Thomas Jane. And if there’s a raw emotionality to Hilditch’s zombie drama, that’s because its inspiration comes from a deeply personal experience.
“After the death of my Mum,” the director tells us over Zoom, “it was my job to pack everything down. I was going from room to room, making discoveries and stuff. There was something very cathartic about it, but also cinematically, I was like, ‘I feel like there’s something worth exploring here.’”
The zombies didn’t emerge in the story until later; in that initial bout of writing, Hilditch simply wanted to capture the feeling of bereavement, and reliving memories while exploring an empty home.
“I never thought those early ideas about an exploration of grief would have ended up as a Daisy Ridley zombie movie, but those were the early kernels of it. Of a character who isn’t me, who isn’t dealing with [the death of a mother], but is dealing with grief – just to add one degree of remove from it.”
It was the late 2010s when Hilditch began working on what would become We Bury The Dead, and at that stage, the filmmaker was based in Los Angeles, having just finished his Texas-set Netflix thriller, Rattlesnake. But then the pandemic happened, Hilditch flew back to Australia, and the script also changed locales in the process.
“It was gonna be this big Americana film,” Hilditch recalls. “But that all just became very unrealistic and unwieldy…I started thinking about an island, and that island had to be Tasmania, because it was the perfect size. It has only half a million population, but it’s rugged, it’s breathtakingly beautiful.”
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The pandemic also left Hilditch thinking about how the military might react to a huge disaster in real life – and how it would deal, matter-of-factly, with the phenomenon of corpses beginning to sit up and walk around.
“I wanted that on the periphery of the story: that this was a country in mourning, that was dealing with it themselves. So that meant, [they need] a lot of volunteers. ‘If you can pitch in, please come down. The military’s there to aid you. But we need manpower right now so we can get all these bodies identified, and we can all start moving on before disease sets in.”
With the script written, Hilditch then sent it to Star Wars alum Daisy Ridley – who the filmmaker says was his first choice to play Ava. To his surprise, Ridley was taken by the script, and agreed to star after just one Zoom call.
“It’s never happened that quickly before,” Hilditch says. “Within one week, we were on Zoom. She was like, ‘I’m all in.’ And from that point, it was then just, like, figuring out how to make this as strong as humanly possible.”
Filming began in March 2023, with Alabany, Western Australia standing for Tasmania. The shoot lasted a brisk five weeks – a remarkably brief window to shoot a large, complex zombie movie. It’s a testament to Hilditch and his crew that they managed to create such a cinematic-looking film in such a short time: cinematographer Steve Annis creates a hauntingly beautiful landscape of empty highways and devastated communities.
“You’ve just got no time, never enough money, and you’ve just got to grip it and rip it. And this was probably the most ambitious thing I’ve ever tried to pull off, which is weird because it’s also maybe one of the more intimate, like for stretchers as well, where it’s technically a two hander.”
As for the zombies, they’re more a background gracenote rather than the plot’s driving force; as Ava and her wayward search partner, Clay (Brenton Thwaites) go from house to house, looking for bodies and finding eerie discoveries on the way, the undead are an occasional but disturbing occurrence. With bloodshot eyes and grinding teeth, they’re captivatingly realised by the effects team, but not all are aggressive. It’s this latter idea that separates We Bury The Dead from the groaning zombie horde.
“If you’re [making]a zombie movie in the modern era, you’d better be ready for having the right prosthetics, but also having something to say that’s slightly different or unique,” Hilditch says. “Offering an audience that loves zombie films enough [familiarity], but also trying new stuff.”
Without spoiling things, there’s also the unifying theme of ‘unfinished business’, which plays out in all the characters’ motivations, from Ava to Clay to Mark Coles Smith’s soldier Riley, who has an agenda of his own, to the strangely tragic undead figures that dot the landscape.
“Once that [theme] crept into my mind, and overlapped with Ava’s whole point of being there, I knew I was really onto something,” Hilditch says. “And without that, I don’t know if it would have worked, but when we realise that there’s a common bond between her and what these [zombies] are going through, I thought, ‘Aha, I haven’t really seen that before.’ And that got me really excited about what was like the potential here of executing a zombie movie in the modern era, where you’re being told, ‘No more zombie movies. They’re not allowed.’”
Parallels can be drawn between We Bury The Dead and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later – a horror that did so much to update the zombie genre for the present day. Hilditch is open about how influential that film has been on his career in general; its DNA, he says, “has seeped into every film I’ve everything I’ve made”.
But where the 28 franchise, now up to its fourth entry with The Bone Temple, is angry and in-your-face, We Bury The Dead is its tonal opposite: thoughtful, introspective, albeit studded with the occasional jab of fear. It’s an interesting counterpoint, too, to Hilditch’s These Final Hours – a more aggressive apocalyptic film in which its characters party their way to the end of the world. That is, at least until the protagonist, James (Nathan Phillips) finds a deeper purpose in a lost youngster, Rose, played by a pre-fame Angourie Rice.
“It was, again, a very personal story,” Hilditch says. “It has a big genre element embellishing the story, but it was just about when you’re moving on from that phase of your life, from your 20s into your 30s, and you realise that there’s a lot more to life than getting pissed with your mates every weekend.”
Despite the 12-year gap between that breakthrough film and We Bury The Dead, and Hilditch’s growth as a movie-maker in that period, he says that the process was still ‘chaotic’ – not least because they were trying to achieve so across that 25-day shoot.
“I wish I could say I learned a lot of lessons from These Final Hours,” he says, “but it was just as chaotic, just as stressful, every single hour on set. And then you’ve got the edit, then you’ve got visual effects, then you’ve got all the other stuff. But wouldn’t have it any other way… looking back, it’s like a fever dream. But now this thing exists in the world, and now it’s out there.”
The reward for that chaos and stress came quickly: from its debut at the SXSW festival in March 2025, We Bury The Dead has received some of the best reviews of Hilditch’s career, with Daisy Ridley’s detailed, committed performance rightly singled out for praise. Hilditch has often said in interviews that he gravitates towards stories that are about ‘ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances’, and Ridley’s ideal casting as Ava – a recognisably vulnerable, average woman pitched into the middle of a nightmare.
As We Bury The Dead emerges on digital and disc, Hilditch says he’s “chipping away” at his next feature, with a number of potential projects that could happen next. He adds that his next piece won’t necessarily be a genre film, but those tend to be the ones that get greenlit. If it is another sci-fi or horror movie, though, we can bet that it’ll be from the perspective of another everyday protagonist.
“Like I said before, I love ordinary people dealing with extraordinary situations. That comes first: thinking about a theme, thinking about a character. Is the world ending? I couldn’t give two fucks about a scientist telling us why the world’s ending. I’d rather watch, like, the janitor trying to get his family out because the world’s ending. That’s just more interesting to me. That’s more real. That’s more human.”
We Bury The Dead is available on Digital HD from the 2nd February and Blu-ray and DVD from the 16th February. Distributed by Signature Entertainment.
